@sneak @dsv @CodingOtaku

Other admins and myself are seeing huge increases, in Matrix signups and on Fediverse instances that we run, so I'm not sure what you're basing your opinion on, other than a bit of excitement because Snowden gives his nod of approval and Musk made a recommendation - both sound recommendations IMO, but the current woes only serve to demonstate how vulnerable Signal is to a takedown - like some other recent examples in the social networking world.

There is CableIM, but it's simple enough to just fork Signal yourself and build that out in a distributed fashion, yet the one very distasteful thing in my mouth is the fact that Signal depends upon a DID that you have to expose, and that's simply not acceptable for any of my clients. I suppose it's alright for the Whatsapp folks lol. They already don't mind.

Jabber, on the other hand, well I thiink the last time I used one of my XMPP accounts was when I was on a contract w/GoDaddy. I took down my ejabberd years ago. I've just got no use for it.

Matrix serves several use cases as well that Signal just can't. I use a lot of bridges between other platforms such as IRC, Slack, Telegram, because my clients ask for that. On my own homeservers I bridge IRC to freenode. Matrix rooms can accommodate many other avenues of communication that don't depend on encryption, while still affording you such when the users are using a Matrix client, so you have the best of both worlds, and Signal hasn't maintained a very good track record with me personally where video and audio calls are concerned, with Matrix being pretty much flawless all the time.

One thing I think you're overlooking here too, is that this isn't a popularity contest. FOSS doesn't actually care if you adopt it or not - that's why Microsoft eventually had to kneel and kiss the Linux ring after so many years of claiming it was Satan, and forcing people to kneel down and kiss the Borg Ring of Bill Gates back in the day - it just wasn't a sustainable war, kinda like any country that's tried to occupy Afghanistan, they have nothing to lose but everyone who tries to occupy them has plenty to lose.

So in the end, Linux triumphed, being villified by Mircosoft did nothing to prevent its adoption at a slow and metered pace until Android was introduced, then the war was over.

The same with distributed communication networks - First, we retired NCP and replaced it with IP on 01 January 1983, now all networks are migrating toward that model in the open source world. Signal can do it too, or not. It's not like it really matters because it's a good product but I've currently got Cerulean in Beta on a couple of instances although it's not polished as of yet, It's a great alternative to the three major microblogging platforms in the Fediverse (Mastodon, Misskey, and Pleroma).

I like that it has reddit style threading too. I'm not much of a fan of the Twatter style thread posting. And in a world where folks want to self-host and decide for themselves whether they wish to federate or not, Matrix gets a lot of points there too.